Charles Burnett: Interviews

Talking with Charles Burnett

109 Talking with Charles Burnett Sojin Kim and R. Mark Livengood/1998 Published in Journal of American Folklore 111 (Winter 1998): 69–73. Reprinted by permission of the American Folklore Society, www.afsnet.org. Charles Burnett, a 1988 MacArthur Fellow, has written or directed nine features for television and cinema, often carving his stories of contemporary African American life against the grains of the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, his home. Burnett received his M.F.A. from the UCLA School of Film and Television, and his thesis project Killer of Sheep (1977) was chosen by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry. His more recent and widely distributed feature films include To Sleep with Anger (1990), starring Danny Glover, and The Glass Shield (1995), which was based on actual events and dramatizes the experiences of a rookie sheriff in a corrupt police department.1 For Charles Burnett, films can create values and, in his words, “change how people see one another and how society operates.” Yet despite the acclaim of film critics, his projects have not been widely popular. He attributes this response in part to his films being perceived as “too ethnic,” thus captivating only specific audiences. We met with Burnett in a café in late March 1996, to talk about his work. Speaking at UCLA a year earlier, he had used the words storytelling , folkways, and community when discussing his films. Straining our ears against the hissing espresso machine and city buses growling along drizzle-slick Sunset Boulevard, the three of us discussed these notions , as well as those of tricksters and tradition, and how these themes thread through Burnett’s art. We specifically addressed To Sleep with Anger and Killer of Sheep, exploring how they are formed by Burnett’s experiences of growing up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts and how they both reflect on family and community social dynamics that he associates with a particular way of life. 110 charles burnett: inter views Our interview with Burnett affords the opportunity to explore how a filmmaker who specializes in creating fictional, as opposed to strictly documentary, worlds thinks about folkloric concepts.2 Rather than limiting ourselves merely to identifying and speculating about the functions of the numerous examples of folklore within Burnett’s films, in this essay we splice together our thinking and excerpts from our interview to address how Burnett himself relates ideas important to folklorists. We consider as well the qualities in his films that we find significant due to their evocation of the expressiveness and cadence of everyday life. To Sleep with Anger unfolds around sexagenarian Harry, who has dropped by unexpectedly to visit Suzie and Gideon, old friends he has not seen in the thirty years since they moved to Los Angeles from somewhere in the South, “back home.” In an early scene, Harry plays cards with the youngest of Suzie and Gideon’s two adult sons, Babe Brother. They sit at the kitchen table. In the background, a row of glass pickle jars filled with sprouting plants lines the window; Babe Brother’s wife, Linda, and their son, Sonny, watch and listen. Harry pulls a large knife from his pocket, and the rabbit’s foot hanging from it attracts Sonny’s attention. Linda: You’re not like the rest of Gideon’s friends. Most of them believe if you’re not hard at work then you’re hard at sin. Harry: I’m more modern in my ways. I don’t believe in sin, though there is good and evil. And evil is something that you work at. [To Sonny] You mustn’t touch. Your mother may not like you handling knives. Linda: I think he just wanted to see your rabbit’s foot. Harry: I let this rabbit’s foot take the place of my toby which I lost years ago. Linda: What’s a toby? Harry: A charm that old people teach you how to make. You don’t want to be at a crossroads without one. I had one for a long time that used to belong to my grandmother who had it since she was a child. In my travels I misplaced it. And I’ve been looking over my shoulder ever since. Harry’s remarks suggest his ambiguous character and the fundamental role that he plays in the film. To Sleep with Anger revolves around the ways in which Harry, graciously invited by Gideon to “stay as long as you like,” affects the...